I am reading John Steinbeck’s book Travels with Charley. It is about the author’s travels around the country to meet people, observe humanity, and talk with everyday people in small towns.
The book was published in 1962, following the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election. This is not a book review, but it discusses a wider point the book raises that still holds true more than six decades later.
In one passage, Steinbeck stops in a small town in New Hampshire to talk to a farmer. They discuss how people seemed less open to talking about certain things, but, on a deeper level, the passage gets at how humanity was changing so fast that people had less time to adjust and understand.
Throughout history, humanity has had years, decades, or even hundreds of years to understand and form ideas based on the world around it. At this particular moment in history, the struggle was with the invention of nuclear weapons, the Cold War, and the relationship between the US and the USSR. The changes happened so fast that people struggled to absorb them and understand what they meant.
Steinbeck was speaking about humanity’s ability to acquire tremendous power before developing the emotional or intellectual capacity to understand what it means.
The point is not simply that technology is advancing. Our ability to invent can advance much faster than our ability to comprehend its consequences.
This made me think about today’s conversations around AI. Is it advancing so fast that we don’t really understand what it is or what it can do? The media is louder today, and we are bombarded with numerous concerns: systems using too many resources, such as water; the growth of data centers; smarter-than-human AI; a lack of controls; and even the destruction of humanity.
Today, people hear confident predictions that AI will either solve humanity’s problems or eventually destroy us. The vast amount of competing claims makes it hard to distinguish what we know from what we fear or merely imagine.
We are developing systems that can write, analyze, create, automate work, and perform increasingly complex tasks. Their capabilities are advancing while society is still debating how to manage them, where to draw boundaries, and what their long-term effects might be.
The parallel isn’t exact. Nuclear weapons are physical weapons of mass destruction; AI is a broad set of technologies with many different uses and risks. But Steinbeck’s underlying question applies to both:
What happens when humans gain power they haven’t yet learned to understand or control?
Consider the different fears surrounding AI:
- Will it eliminate jobs faster than people and institutions can adapt?
- Will we become so dependent on it that we lose important skills?
- Could increasingly autonomous systems make consequential decisions that humans cannot adequately understand or supervise?
- Could AI become so powerful that humanity loses control over how it is used?
These are different questions, with different levels of uncertainty. They should not all be treated as equally likely or inevitable. But they share a concern about the gap between technological capability and our ability to manage it.
In Conclusion
Even six decades later, the technology might be different, but the ideas, concerns, and issues remain. Today, we face not only new technology but also a constant stream of communication, news, and opinions about it. Humanity hasn’t fundamentally changed, and neither has our struggle to understand and adapt to a world that seems to change faster than we can keep up.
What are your thoughts and concerns about AI and how quickly our world is changing? I’d love to hear your opinions.
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